In the downloads section of each release, you can find pre-built binaries in zip packages: protoc-$VERSION-$PLATFORM.zip. It contains the protoc binary as well as a set of standard .proto files distributed along with protobuf.

If you are looking for an old version that is not available in the release page, check out the maven repo here:

These pre-built binaries are only provided for released versions. If you want to use the github master version at HEAD, or you need to modify protobuf code, or you are using C++, it's recommended to build your own protoc binary from source.

Protobuf Runtime Installation

Protobuf supports several different programming languages. For each programming language, you can find instructions in the corresponding source directory about how to install protobuf runtime for that specific language: